Translations:Working with images/2/en

Images are files which contain the contents of a virtual disk. Images often contain a base operating system used to create a volume or an ephemeral disk from which a virtual machine boots. An ephemeral disk is a virtual disk file which resides on the host (or hypervisor) where the virtual machine runs. Ephemeral disk files are destroyed when a VM is destroyed, in contrast to volumes. Images are portable in that they can be downloaded from the cloud, used to create a virtual machine using virtual box or similar on your laptop, and uploaded to another cloud and used to create a new virtual machine. This is not the case with volumes or ephemeral disks. Images come in a variety of formats. Some commonly encountered formats are, raw, qcow2, vmdk, and vdi.